A blog associated with Anna McMurray's course in pop culture at Koç University

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Hanımın Çiftliği

In her article Güven talks about how social classes and families are shown in Turkish TV. She claims that working class families are in general, happier than the middle class families and there are always troubles in the lives of middle class people and when people from working class family try to switch to middle class there is always something bad happens to them. A TV show called “Hanımın Çiftliği” which was a big hit in Turkish TV, shows signs that both agree and disagree with Güven’s ideas about stereotypes in TV shows. In the show which sets at 1950’s, the main character Güllü is from a poor working class family, who is always treated badly by her father and brother. Unlike what Güven suggests, Güllü and her family is not happy of their life conditions and they want more. So her father wants her to marry Ramazan, the nephew of a rich factory owner, but Güllü doen’t want to marry Ramazan because she is in love with Kemal, another character from the working class. In the end Güllü ends up marrying Muzaffer, the rich and powerful factory owner himself, even though she doesn’t love him. But later, she starts to fall in love with Muzaffer and they become very happy together. She entirely changes herself by changing her name to a more modern name, learning foreign languages and traveling to Europe. But then as Güven would said that to happen, something bad happens and Muzaffer is murdered. But Güllü has become powerful now and starts to run the factory herself. We see that Güllü is becoming very dominant and authoritarian character as she doesn’t even let her family to enter her new life and have what she has and we can say that she becomes a mean character. This is a very long story with complicated events but at the end due to the rebellion of the factory workers, Güllü loses the factory but in the end she marries again with a lawyer called Erdoğan and have a decent life. In conclusion, I believe differently than other stereotypes of working class, in this show, working class is not the class that is happy but its the one that struggles and also it shows that although the struggles Güllü had, she managed to switch from working class to middle class.